Film · 1964 · Films · 1960s
Fail Safe
Scored from 167 calibrated IMDb reviewers, each re-centered on their own rating baseline before the title is ranked. Cohort: Films · 1960s (1,929 peers).
Summary
A mechanical failure in the American early-warning system sends a squadron of nuclear-armed Vindicator bombers past their fail-safe point with irrevocable orders to destroy Moscow. From a bunker beneath the White House, the President works through a single interpreter on the hotline to the Soviet premier, trying to prove the attack is an accident, while Strategic Air Command in Omaha tries to recall or shoot down its own crews. In Washington, the hawkish strategist Professor Groeteschele argues the malfunction is an opportunity rather than a catastrophe. Sidney Lumet directs this black-and-white Cold War thriller, adapted from the Burdick and Wheeler novel and carrying no musical score.
Fail Safe is a 1964 drama and thriller film. The runtime is 112 minutes. Its country of origin is listed as the United States. Its certificate is Approved.
1,928 other films from the 1960s form the cohort it is ranked inside. The calibrated figure is built from 167 reviewers whose rating history varies enough to place their own average. A broader pool of 171 reviewers with two or more reviews feeds the raw-average track instead.
How the score was built
We compare the reviewers of this title against every other title those same people reviewed. Each review is scored relative to the reviewer's own baseline — a 7/10 from a hard grader sits well above their average, while a 7/10 from a generous grader sits below theirs. Every reviewer then counts the same, so the result is a calibrated consensus rather than a raw average.
- Global percentile
- Where Fail Safe lands against every title we rank.
- In-cohort percentile
- The same comparison narrowed to its cohort — titles of the same format released in the same decade. A 1970s film is judged against 1970s films, not against last year's streaming series. Ranked against Films · 1960s (1,929 titles).
- AI-adjusted percentile
- The same reviewer-normalized score, corrected for how much confidence the sample supports: thin samples are pulled toward the corpus average. Each title keeps the share n / (n + 53) of its measured distance from the average, where n is its calibrated-reviewer count, and the result is ranked on the same scale as the global percentile.53 is the median sample size across everything we rank. Here n is 167.
Cohort: Films · 1960s
